NOTES for Mar 10:32-52

How much Christ's disciples understood His words about the Cross will forever remain a mystery for us. It is quite possible that some hope still glimmered in them that the Teacher was speaking in parables and that His prediction would not be fulfilled literally. Perhaps this explains the striking contrast between Christ's words about death and resurrection and the request of the sons of Zebedee. After all, only if one expected Christ to reign in glory could one ask Him for high places beside Him. "You do not know what you are asking" - these words of Christ emphasize the depth of human misunderstanding of God's plan. All the more inappropriate and presumptuous are the words of the sons of Zebedee that they can drink Christ's cup and be baptized with His baptism.

Two most important things stand out in Christ's answer. First, He says: "You will drink the cup that I drink." For a human being it would be natural to rebuke the brothers for exalting themselves: who among people can do this? But the Lord says: you will. His following words, that whoever wants to be first among His disciples must be slave of all, put everything in its place. The chief gift of Christ to His disciples is not nearness to the throne, but precisely His cup, the possibility of following Him along His way of the Cross. Therefore He tells the sons of Zebedee that "high position" must not be their goal. He opens to them the possibility of gaining nearness to God without acquiring any outward greatness. This is an exceptionally important revelation, one that applies to any of His disciples.

The apostles still had a poor idea of what the Kingdom that their Teacher brought into the world was, if they asked Him questions about who would occupy the places of honor beside Him in that Kingdom. For them, it was apparently a reality of our world, though an unusual one. Perhaps they thought the matter concerned an earthly state that, however, would be full of God's signs and wonders performed by their Teacher, who at last, with God's help, would take the place that belonged to Him. And the question about the cup and the washing, or "baptism," they most likely understood to mean that before the triumph all of them would face a long struggle, and each would receive no small share of suffering, which in general fit the messianic ideas accepted at the time.

Jesus, however, accepts their readiness, telling them that they will have to drink one cup with Him and be washed with one washing with Him, without going into details and without trying to explain anything to them. As can be seen, He understood that at that moment any explanations were useless: the disciples would not have understood Him anyway, just as they had not understood Him up to that point.

But Jesus tells His disciples right away that in His Kingdom everything is not as it is in earthly kingdoms, evidently so that they would have no illusions about this from the very beginning. As can be seen, He regards the inner readiness not to rule but to serve as the spiritual foundation without which there can be no question of life in the Kingdom. The details of the Kingdom's structure, however, He evidently considers less important: if the disciples do not understand them now, they will understand later, having acquired the corresponding spiritual experience. Thus the Savior Himself sets the priorities where spiritual life is concerned: first comes what is necessary in order to enter the Kingdom, and only afterward, as spiritual experience is accumulated, everything else.

The question of primacy periodically came up in the disciples' conversations among themselves, coming up again and again. They undoubtedly still imagined the Kingdom as entirely earthly, and in every earthly state, even one established by God, there is a king and there are those close to him. They naturally saw their Teacher as the King, since they had no doubt about His messiahship, but who would be among those close to Him? All twelve, that is clear, but someone would turn out to be among the closest; someone would sit at the King's right hand, and someone at His left.

That is how it had been in every age and in every state, and the apostles simply could not yet imagine the Kingdom in any other way. These conversations are especially remarkable against the background of Jesus' account of the sufferings and death awaiting Him. The disciples seem not to notice the Teacher's words, although in reality they simply do not hear Him, as a person often does not hear what does not fit into his consciousness. Jesus again and again tries to explain to them that in the Kingdom, which entered the world together with Him, everything is not as it is in the earthly kingdoms of the fallen world.

He says directly to the disciples: in the fallen world rulers strive for power above all, and for power not so much over bodies as over the souls of those whom they want to rule. Power in the fallen world is a way to take other people for oneself, their lives, their souls, so that afterward they belong to the ruler, and he can dispose of them at his own discretion, just as anyone is free to dispose of himself, his own soul, and his own life. The Kingdom is arranged differently; there the question of power, or rather of what there corresponds to the concept of power in the earthly sense, is the question of service.

To the extent that a person is ready to be the slave of all, to that extent he has power, in the special sense of the word, the sense in which it is applicable to the relations of the Kingdom. This is about slavery in the patriarchal form in which it existed among the Jews, when a slave was effectively a member of the household, but without rights. A slave claimed nothing in the house, but he lived in it and used everything in the house that the other members of the household used. In some cases he could even inherit from the master of the house.

A household slave worked as slaves always worked, without counting the cost and without demanding payment. In return he received as much as he needed, since he had no fixed wages. This is the position toward others that is adequate from the standpoint of the relations that bind the inhabitants of the Kingdom to one another. In the fallen world, of course, nothing like this can exist, but Jesus orients the disciples precisely toward the relations of the Kingdom, at least when it comes to their relations with Him and with one another.

The apostles' path after Christ was not easy. And not because they knew what awaited Him and them ahead, but precisely because they did not know. Of course, after Peter's confession none of them doubted that Jesus was the very Messiah promised by God, whom the people of God had so long awaited.

But this Messiah acted in a completely mysterious and incomprehensible way. The apostles were people of their time; from the Messiah they expected the same thing as most of their contemporaries: He was to begin the messianic war against the pagans, and therefore against Rome, win this war, restore, in fact create anew, a strong Jewish state based on the laws of the Torah, and become king of this state.

If Jesus had acted that way, or even had intended to act that way, everything would have been clear to the apostles. Of course, a messianic uprising and the war that would inevitably follow it could not fail to frighten them. But the apostles were ready for this; the prospect of war as such would hardly have horrified them. Something else horrified them: that Jesus was precisely not going to do any of what they expected from Him. More than that, He more and more often began speaking to them about the death awaiting Him. And this was already completely incomprehensible.

Of course, the image of the suffering Messiah is present in the prophetic books, and everyone knew it well. But this image was usually interpreted in the sense that the Messiah might have to suffer precisely during the messianic war, and the measure of His suffering would depend on the sinfulness and impurity of those who would be near Him. But no one thought or spoke about the Messiah's death. It was assumed that after all the sufferings the Messiah would ultimately emerge from the war as victor and finally become King of His Kingdom, which, however, was perceived as a fully earthly phenomenon.

If the Messiah died, it would have been an utterly unthinkable cosmic catastrophe: for then it would turn out that God's plan for the deliverance of the people and the building of God's Kingdom had collapsed. Yet Jesus again and again says that He is going to Jerusalem not for victory and not for triumph, but for death. His disciples had reason to be horrified. And yet they still follow Him, because there is no other road for them anymore. They go into the unknown after the Teacher.

The apostles try to understand Christ by ordinary human logic. Their everyday ideas have not yet been transformed by the light they have recently begun to receive from the Teacher, and therefore they themselves "do not know what they ask."

Many of us come to God in order to receive. And He gives us much, but we insatiably demand more and more, and in the end, as in the well-known tale, we find ourselves beside a broken trough.

Meanwhile Christ Himself, from the point of view of His successful surroundings, remained beside a "broken trough" in Gethsemane and on Golgotha. To everyone who wants to be with Him, He offers a share in what looks to those around Him like defeat and failure. But only in this way, through the cross, does one come to the Resurrection. By accepting at least a part of His self-emptying, only a tiny part, since Christ does not want us to shoulder what we cannot bear, one can receive the right to share with Him the joy of Triumph. And it is precisely into this joy that the One who came not "to be served, but to serve" wants to lead us.

In an encounter with Jesus, some are healed and others are not. Some notice Him, others ignore Him. Some come near, others pass by. And among those who come near, some come for the Kingdom and for life, while others come to argue or catch Him in His words. To each his own.

The blind man by the road wants healing - he wants to receive his sight, to see, and above all to see the One who can give him back his sight, the very ability to see. Is this possible? Yes, of course. In the Kingdom everything is possible, and this blind man is striving with all his strength toward the very One who brought the Kingdom into the world.

It is possible, but only on one condition: the encounter becomes the chief and only important goal, for whose sake, if necessary, any conventions, prohibitions, and limits can be pushed aside. This is, of course, not about God's commandments, but precisely about limits and rules invented by people, about human opinions. The blind man calls Jesus the Son of David, and therefore the Messiah. They try to make him be silent, since no one had officially recognized Jesus as the Messiah, and even unofficially opinions differed sharply.

At that moment Jesus was, in public opinion, a scandalous figure, or at least an ambiguous one in every respect. To press toward Him like that, one had to trust Him completely - not even against social conventions, but above them, simply ignoring them and seeing only the Person Himself. Relationships with Christ like that are truly saving. Not because He is God and Man at the same time, but because those relationships are real; if they were not real, even His divinity would not help.

In the end, everything is determined precisely by relationships, by their depth and authenticity, whether they are relationships with God or with another person. Real relationships are always unconditional: they cannot be conditioned by any external factors - social, religious, or any others. Only then do relationships become effective, changing those who enter into them. Then in relationship with Christ everything is possible - miracles, healings, participation in the Kingdom. Otherwise everything is useless, even if one meets Him face to face.

Jesus performs healings a little differently each time. Sometimes He touches a person and lays His hands on him, and sometimes He says, as He said to the blind man He healed on the Jericho road: your faith has saved you. What, then, saved the others? Was it not faith? Of course it was: without faith Jesus can help no one. This is, of course, faith as trust, trust in God and trust in Him Himself, the One through whom God acts, through whom God's power and God's love act.

For healing, such trust was enough: the person being healed did not need to understand truly who stood before him; he did not need to see in Jesus the Messiah, still less the Son of God. Something else mattered: trust in Jesus as the One through whom God acts, and acts in fullness, so that nothing is impossible for Him. Given such trust, a person can do more than establish a trusting relationship with Jesus; he can become part of His life, and therefore part of the Kingdom, at least in part and for a time. The fullness of such entry into the life of the Kingdom is determined in many ways by a person's spiritual condition. In principle, every person healed by Jesus, having shared through Him in the life of the Kingdom, could have remained its inhabitant, of course on condition that he preserved the state he experienced at the moment of healing. He would then have shared Christ's path with Him and would have been one of those for whom Pentecost became not the beginning, but the completion of the path, or at least of one of its stages.

For most of those healed, however, healing became only a return to the state available to people in the fallen world. Few of them regarded healing as the starting point of a further spiritual path. Meanwhile, the blind man healed by Jesus on the Jericho road followed Jesus. He decided to share at least part of the path with the One who had healed him. Such a step requires far more trust than simply coming up and asking for healing. With such trust, healing does not even require physical contact; trust alone is enough, the relationship itself as such. The evangelist tells us nothing about Bartimaeus's further fate, but one thing is clear: he followed Jesus. How far he went is a matter between the two of them.

Mark's Gospel, in describing the healing of the blind man, adds one striking detail that is not found in Luke's Gospel: besides the name of the man who was healed, the evangelist mentions the phrase with which the people around him encouraged him, saying, "Take heart; get up, He is calling you." At first glance, the situation looks paradoxical: the man who had just been calling out to Jesus himself, paying no attention at all to the reaction of the crowd, now suddenly stops, as though frightened by something, and does not dare come near the One he had just been calling to for help. What is Bartimaeus afraid of? Certainly not people. If he had been afraid of people, he would not have cried out to the One whom everyone considered a great Prophet in order to draw His attention. Nor is he afraid of Jesus Himself as a Man. Apparently Bartimaeus suddenly sensed something unusual, something this astonishing Prophet carries with Him and within Himself. He sensed that very Kingdom about which Jesus Himself never tired of testifying, saying that it had "drawn near." And after sensing it, he suddenly became timid and stopped. He was not strong in theology. The subtleties of the many messianic theories and concepts studied at that time in the academies of Jerusalem and Babylon were hardly known to him. But he did sense the breath of the Kingdom, precisely because he had entrusted himself completely to this strange and unusual Teacher. And after sensing it, he understood that he was not ready to enter it. The people around him, not understanding what had stopped this man who had just been so determined, push him forward: go, He is calling you. And Bartimaeus goes. To the people around him, he is going toward his healing. Yet he is also taking a step into the Kingdom.

Hearing the blind man's cry, “Have mercy on me,” Jesus responded at once and entered into conversation with him. But the healing did not happen immediately. Before working His miracle, He asked Bartimaeus what he actually wanted, what this mercy was to consist in. The blind man immediately replied, “Let me see.” Then he received not only ordinary sight, but also the certainty that Christ stood before him. It is no accident that “he followed Jesus along the road.”

Sometimes the Lord waits for us to recognize our problem ourselves and put into words exactly what we cannot overcome without His miracle. Is this not one aspect of the sacrament of confession? Until we recognize our sin and speak it aloud in the presence of a priest, it cannot be forgiven us.

Bartimaeus wants to see. Often people who ask for something are afraid of it at the same time, because then they will have to change their familiar way of life, and that always creates problems. If Bartimaeus receives his sight, he will have to stop begging, start looking for work, and generally take responsibility for himself and those around him. But he is ready for this: he not only cries out to Christ, but goes to Him, throwing off his outer garment, perhaps his only valuable possession. Bartimaeus risks being unable to find it again if he does not receive his sight, yet he is ready to cast aside everything valuable in order to ask for the one thing that matters most. He goes to Jesus and, once he can see, remains with Him. How often the “outer garment” to which we cling—different for each of us—prevents us from going to Jesus and receiving true sight from Him...

Different people react differently to Jesus' appearance. And the most direct reaction, as a rule, is shown by those who seek help from Him, most often healing. This is understandable: such people usually have nothing to lose. What demand can be made of a blind beggar sitting by the highway? Those around him try to make him be quiet or at least not shout so loudly.

They can be understood: by this time all kinds of rumors about Jesus were already circulating among the people, and attitudes toward Him and His preaching were ambiguous. To many respected and authoritative people in religious society, it seemed at least doubtful. But the blind beggar by the roadside had little concern for these respected and authoritative people: none of them could help him. Nor did the respected and authoritative people need him. Of course, they gave him alms, and he did not die of hunger.

But that was the limit of what he could receive from society and from the people respected in society. And here is someone who can help for real, can heal, can deliver from blindness. Some preacher. People say He is a prophet. Perhaps He is not a prophet, but He heals, that is certain. If such a one passes by on the road, how can one not make use of the opportunity? How can one not call out? All the more if seeing again is the chief goal and chief meaning of life. Here an important spiritual law is at work: for relationships with God, relationships with Christ, to be full, they must become unconditional. A person must follow Christ without looking back.

Without looking back at tradition, customs, or religious authorities. Otherwise nothing will come of it. And to go that way, one needs inner freedom from all this. Such freedom as that of the blind man by the road, who has nothing to lose. Who wants one thing, and wants it with all his soul, with his whole being. He, of course, does not yet understand whom he is dealing with. But his resolve is great; those who try to make him be quiet do not have such resolve. And thanks to this resolve and to his trust in the Stranger, the blind beggar receives what he wants. Those who tried to make him be quiet receive nothing. That is not surprising: after all, they were not seeking anything.

As if clarifying His earlier words, Jesus says: it is hard for one who trusts in riches to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. It would seem that there is hope in these words: one can be rich while relying not on what one has, but on God. In practice, however, everything proves much more complicated.

The disciples are horrified: they are sure that they will not see the Kingdom. Peter, more decisive than all the rest, as often happened, asks the Teacher the question that everyone wanted to ask but was afraid to. He says to Jesus: look, we have left everything and followed You. Is that not enough? Is something else needed? What will we receive after doing what we have done? Who are we, rich or poor? What are we hoping in?

Such questions are usually asked when something incomprehensible is happening. And that is how it was: the apostles truly understood almost nothing. They trusted the Teacher, but they always had difficulty understanding Him. And now a real theater of absurdity was beginning, behind which something so terrible could already be seen that the apostles were paralyzed by the very thought of that horror.

Jesus points them to the only way out: to look only to the Kingdom, to live only by it, to abide in it constantly. To the question "what will there be for us?" He answers: not "will be," but "is," already here and now. And ahead of you something still more joyful awaits. But if you do not see it, if you cannot receive it here and now, there will be no "later." For the Kingdom has already drawn near. And one must enter it now, without putting it off until later.

"Many who are first will be last, and the last first." What do these words mean? Why must it be this way? Have we become so used to words of this kind that nothing in them surprises us anymore? It is clear, we think, that justice requires the very last, the poorest and most unfortunate, to be repaid in another world with honor and power. But, as we have said with you more than once, such logic does not go beyond the logic of the communists: "whoever was nothing will become everything." And it is impossible even to imagine joining this soul-destroying force to the teaching of our Lord. In the late Soviet years there was a joke: in 1917, an old princess looks out the window and asks a man passing by what all the noise is about, what is happening. The man answers that the Red Army soldiers want there to be no rich people. Strange, she replies; my grandfather wanted there to be no poor people. This logic of shaking the world upside down, which the Bolsheviks served, has nothing in common with the teaching of our Lord, who is the God of ineffable kindness. It is only an evil parody of it. So let us try to think about what these words mean after all: many who are first will be last, and the last first. Imagine this scene: a group of runners at the starting line. The signal is given and everyone begins to run. Someone breaks ahead, and someone falls behind. Suddenly a signal is given to run back to the start. Who will arrive first? Obviously, the last. And we see this movement of return as repentance, because metanoia is a turning, a return. Let this be only an image. But why could it not be that this is exactly what the Lord wanted to say? Let us remember Psalm 84: You forgave all the iniquities of Your people; You covered all their sins; You turned back from the wrath of Your anger; turn us back, O God of our salvation. The same situation appears, for example, in the Vulgate, where this conversus - converte sounds twice, while it disappeared in the Synodal translation, where it says "turned away - restore." All this appears to us as an argument, perhaps not a very weighty one but still an argument, in favor of our image for today's words of the Lord, even if we have differed somewhat from the way the apostle Paul uses this image.

After the rich young man was unable to follow the word of the Lord Jesus, to give everything away and become His disciple, the Lord, addressing the disciples, speaks about how hard it is for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Explaining to the disciples what happened, the Lord says: "How hard it is for those who trust in riches to enter the Kingdom of God." A camel trying to enter through the eye of a needle is an image the disciples remembered forever. Usually the readers' attention is drawn to this strange, even somewhat surreal picture. It may be that the translation of this saying into Greek, made by the evangelist Mark from the Aramaic in which Christ spoke, and in which Peter told this story, is not entirely perfect; we do not know. It is obvious that the Lord is speaking about something absolutely impossible, and this is what Peter remembered and Mark translated.

The words about those who trust in riches, however, are found in late versions of the Gospel text. The copyists may have inserted them there by analogy with the accounts of the other evangelists; in the Middle Ages there was such a tendency toward unifying the accounts of the Synoptics. The most ancient manuscripts do not contain these words, and Mark's text in them sounds simply astonishing. The Lord says: "Children! How hard it is to enter the Kingdom of God; it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God." Thus the issue is not even wealth: according to Christ's words, it is hard in general to enter the Kingdom of God. Wealth and reliance on it are only a particular, especially vivid example.

This is exactly how the disciples understand Christ's words. That is why they do not speak about wealth, especially since they do not have any. "Who then can be saved?" they ask the Lord. Peter, perplexed, asks an even more specific question: "And we, who have followed You? Is it really hard for us too to enter the Kingdom of God?" The disciples get the impression that entering the Kingdom of God is impossible for absolutely anyone, even for them, who have left everything. It is to this question that the Lord gives us a word of great hope: "With men this is impossible, but not with God, for all things are possible with God." No human merits will help a person enter the Kingdom of God. Only God Himself accomplishes our salvation, and our human ideas are powerless here: many who are last will be first, and the first last; for people this is a mystery. But the main thing is that this is a great hope, open to all.